The UNI product resides on a site's host and fills an "interface" role between your organization's application system and the AAMVA telecommunication network (AAMVAnet). UNI's network interface and application interface functionality translates messages to and from your partner organizations so that you can focus on your core business logic and your applications.

To support the wide variety of hardware and operating systems used by the AAMVA community, the UNI product is available for various platforms. For more information, please contact us below.

Application Interface

UNI's application interface insulates an organization's application programmers from having to deal with network-specific requirements. UNI provides a rich set of APIs which allow an organization's outbound and inbound applications to exchange messages with UNI.

Main application interface features:

• Message translation: UNI translates messages from a logical format (easy to manipulate within an application) to the AAMVA network format (AMIE).
• Message grouping: UNI groups and sorts response messages in an application message file. The file layout is provided to enable applications to access the file.
• Application notification: UNI notifies an application after the transaction is complete or every time a response message is received.
• Store and forward: UNI stores and forwards messages using either a time interval or a specific time of day.
• Time-out: You can specify a time after which UNI notifies the application that the transaction is incomplete. In addition, you can automatically abort the incomplete transaction.

Network Interface

UNI's network interface features:

• Routing validation: UNI performs a routing validation for every outbound and inbound message. It uses a user-defined table, indicating the applications supported by each trading partner.
• Traffic logging: UNI logs every outbound and inbound message.
• Undeliverable message processing: UNI can retry delivery of messages that were undelivered the first time. You can specify the number of retries.
• Network service support: UNI supports different network services such as AAMVAnet's Network Control Software (NCS), GXS's Information Exchange, and RJE/NJE.
• Network administration: UNI handles all of the network administrative messages, such as Network Status transactions, Site Table Update transactions, Free Format Text messages, and Transaction Count transactions.
• To accommodate different application and network service requirements, UNI can operate in online mode, batch mode, or a combination of both:
  • Online: UNI uses the inter-process communication protocol available on the platform it is operating on (for example, web services for Windows, TDQ for CICS, message queues for UNIX) to exchange messages with the site application and the site communication software.
  • Batch: UNI uses batch sequential files to exchange messages with the site application and the site communication software.
  • Batch application and online network service: For some AAMVA applications, you can format messages in batch mode and then use the online network service (Network Control Software) to transmit them. In this case, the site application passes a batch sequential file of messages to UNI but UNI sends the messages to the site communication software using the inter-process communication protocol available on the platform.
  • Online application and batch network service: The site application sends messages to UNI using the inter-process communication protocol available on the platform and UNI passes a batch sequential file of messages to the site communication software.